Spammers Tricking Desperate Job Seekers

E-mail security solutions provider Red Condor has revealed that the latest wave of e-mail scams is mainly targeting the job seekers. These scams include the ones claiming to be offering jobs from reputable and well-known companies like Starbucks and Pepsi, or purporting as messages from authentic job sites such as Monster.com and CareerBuilder.

Red Condor explained that the fake job offers often involve payment processing requests, providing fraudsters an opportunity to ask for the bank account details from a respondent.

Besides using direct e-mail spam, spammers are making use of Craigslist to post phony job advertisements. When people in desperate need of job respond to such ads, they receive e-mail asking them to visit a "credit check" site to get credit scores. The link for credit check contains the scammer's associate, thus the payment of credit-check by victims earns a commission to the scammer.

Online scammers are also abusing social networking websites as millions of people hunting for jobs visit these websites to search for lucrative job offers. Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are the three popular social networking sites which are being used by spammers for their malicious intents, as job seekers post their resumes on these sites.

Worried by the online job scams, Dr. Tom Steding, CEO, Red Condor, stated that the various phishing scams have completely cut down the probability of a person receiving any legitimate job offering and victims have either lost their hard-earned money or confidential details to unreliable and fake sources, reported the darkreading.com on August 11, 2009.

Steding further added that spammers are proving that they are able to go to any extent by focusing on methods to spam millions of jobless people looking for work. In such a situation, businesses are required to make sure that they are having efficient e-mail security and filtering technology to block spam e-mails from infiltrating their networks.

Eventually, job seekers should be vigilant and should thoroughly check the employment offers on receiving job calls. Security experts advises them to confirm the offer by logging on to the website of the concerned company and checking if that company is actually conducting any recruitment process or not.

Related article: Spammers Continue their Campaigns Successfully

» SPAMfighter News - 8/28/2009